proam timeline

02/17/2011

I'm excited to have finally launched Asheville Fashions, a blog about Asheville fashion and street style, though my wack flipcam skills are exposed in this first post of a couple in downtown Asheville.

02/16/2011

Finally figured out all the pieces of Buried Quotes. It ultimately meant giving up my initial idea, adapting it to the designs and algorithms of our web/tech overloads and may have resulted in an even better project. Same basic concept but with less hassles and improved access!

02/13/2011

I'm starting back to work on netweed, my first major website, by cleaning up a lot of details and re/building the Hip Hop @ netweed section. Hopefully that will clear the way for work on expanding The Paper Plant section of the site when Mr. D-J is ready!

01/08/2011

I ran multiple hip hop related sites for the last five years before selling the two big ones and putting the others on hiatus. A couple of these sites provided info services (press releases, new album reports). Though the press release site was often disrespected by hip hop bloggers who would link to articles at other sites that were simply press releases with a writer's byline added, it got plenty of traffic and links and was one of the ones I sold. The albums site rarely got linked to from people who I know were using the service but had a core following that kept up closely with the site.

Since shutting them down I've been hearing from folks who now realize that, under the new owners, the press release site will never be what it was and they now see that nothing like that exists anymore. But the strongest response was to shutting down my new albums report whose core audience was devoted but never linked out. That lack of links and acknowledgement was part of the problem keeping it smaller than it should have been and limiting possible income so that I was doing that one for less than $1 an hour by the end!

As I debated shutting that down, I got multiple comments and emails from people who thanked me and encouraged me to keep going but never really supported the site. One guy even said he used it every week as a source of info for his site and praised it highly. I searched his site for links to the albums report and found none at all.

I did get a couple of people saying they would link to me and help publicize the site but it was too little, too late.

I'm not saying these were invaluable services to the world but they were solid professional services for a niche audience that mostly took without giving. At some level, it gives me a perverse pleasure to see their after the fact responses but mostly it makes me sad. More importantly, it's a reminder to support and appreciate the things that one finds important or even simply useful in the world because when those things are gone, I'm starting to see that they're rarely replaced.

01/01/2011

Spent New Year's in downtown Asheville. Encountered a surprisingly clueless bartender at the Thirsty Monk but I was glad to finally check out the bar. Ended up at the Lexington Avenue Brewery where we saw Sirius.B along with a lot of really cool and friendly people who danced a lot.

12/30/2010

Here we go. College Textbook News is no more, All World Dance is preparing for a January launch and netweed lurks in the background, always ready for action! Oh, yeah, Cultural Research will also play a role in 2011.

At this point, I feel like I'm a week behind which isn't bad at all. That could change but things are finally falling into place.

12/04/2010

Wow! College Textbook News will soon be no more. Though I usually try to keep up even short-lived blogging experiments, I have a separate account for CTN and that's just enough for me to take it totally offline as I tidy up my digital house.

It's all about cutting my burn rate as I prepare for the launch of All World Dance, a dance portal, soon to be my major focus in tandem with a dance-related writing project inspired by my dissertation.

11/28/2010

So I will soon be a resident of Asheville, NC and will found out what's up with that interesting little town.

I'm also considering pivoting my web focus, shutting down the remnants of my current hip hop websites and even closing the still-in-beta College Textbook News.

Hard to believe but there it is. Actually, Asheville is easy to believe. It's what happens next that's a bit harder. However, my current plans are focusing more on dance-related projects and, though some will be quite demanding, I feel like I may be entering a zone where I can accomplish quite a bit.

Asheville by mid-December. Announcements about web projects as they are ready to be announced.